Georgia will be leading our Ash Wednesday service this coming week on Wednesday 14th February at 7.30pm. The service will include the Imposition of Ashes and Holy Communion. This service will be Live Streamed.
Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of the season of Lent. The service is a time where we can examine ourselves and have the sign of the cross put on our forehead (optional). Imposing the sign of the cross on the forehead is a sign of our penitence, and a symbol of our mortality.
Bishop Philip says the following words in his Ash Wednesday reflection Ash Wednesday brings us face to face with a reality which we would much rather, but really cannot avoid; the reality of our own mortality, of our own death; the reality of our own sin. This is a time of tension between dying and birth: but only as we face our dying and our sin can we find new birth. It is only as we die to sin that we can be born again to eternal life.
Lent, and Ash Wednesday in particular, force us then to take a long hard look at ourselves; to take stock of ourselves in a way that we might very well prefer not to do. They hold a mirror up to us and force us to face up to ourselves. In many ways there are a myriad other places we would rather look than there, in that mirror, and that is true of people of belief and faith at least as much as it is of anyone else.